🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (11 tweets)
ok, so, "having friends is gay" guy admitted that adjusting to fatherhood is hard then everyone got mad at him. I haven't seen the explanation of the dynamics which makes the most sense to me so I will describe it he did not, in fact, disapprove of having friends
"having friends is gay" (HFIG) tweet was about shaming himself into behaving the way he felt he needed to (ie not abandoning his wife w an infant to go out drinking). there was conflict between parts and the superego-aligned part shamed the id-aligned part, and he externalized it
so "my desire to go out drinking w friends is shameful" became HFIG now, with "fatherhood in modern us culture is hard bc on top of everything else, the resource commitment leaves no time for trivial fun w friends" (my framing not his), how do you think he's been managing that?
my bet is that team superego has been shaming and berating any id-aligned part that thinks "I would enjoy not caring for a wife and infant for a day and instead getting drunk and high with friends" I think most men regulate their behavior this way
and the interesting thing is how team superego will attack team id across person boundaries. so when their supergo sees someone else's id suggest something like "not getting to have a certain kind of fun anymore makes parenting harder" it attacks and shames them
suppressing the desire to abandon your family to go out drinking is an important and good step. but you can't fully embody the Father archetype with all that internal resistance. either you tap out and become Divorced Dad, or you make an internal peace
I don't think it's possible to do this by killing or subjugating the id; that does seem to be stable but turns you into a different, more stern archetype the Uncle Iroh type Father I'm aiming for has sympathy for his own id aligned parts, but chooses caretaking out of love
anyway I definitely have parts that prefer easy fun to hard rewarding caretaking and I am not ashamed of that. I went through the stage he's going through. I hope he continues to choose his family but also finds ways to get what he needs